Chesterton Cemetery Manager Chery Bachman can’t even begin to put a dollar value on the volunteer efforts to remove tree debris from the Aug. 11 derecho. “It’s priceless,” she said.
“It’s always great when any part of your community volunteers,” she said. “Some have been here every day.”
On Thursday, members of the Daughters of the American Revolution’s William Henry Harrison Chapter raked leaves, hauled limbs and did other tree-related chores to spruce up the cemetery.
Regent Sherry Taylor called their efforts rewarding. “This is the historic part of the cemetery, and it needs our attention,” she said.”
She recruited her husband, Mike Taylor, to wield his chainsaw on a large maple tree that had fallen. “The tree’s actually laying on one (marker), and there’s one damaged, completely off the base.”
“I think the damage has already been done,” Mike said, but he was still cautious not to cause additional damage to the markers.
“The big stones are kind of keeping it off the smaller stones,” he said as he stacked up logs by smaller stones to protect them while sawing off chunks of the tree trunk and large limbs.
For past regent Diane Schweitzer, it was helping family.
“I’ve got a lot of family here, and this is where I’m going to be. I’ve got a reservation right over there,” she said, pointing to another part of the vast cemetery.
“It’s kind of meaningful for us to do this work,” she said.
The DAR spends a lot of volunteer hours working on cemeteries, usually cleaning tombstones. “Historic preservation is one of our pillars,” Sherry Taylor said.
“It’s beautiful with the trees,” she said, looking around the old cemetery.
Bachman said the cemetery dates back to 1838.
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John Goodloe, Schweitzer’s cousin, said the maple tree that Mike Taylor was cutting up had probably been around when the first grave at the cemetery was dug.
“My parents are here, and my grandparents,” he said.
He noted there are graves without markers in that part of the cemetery, which has tombstones that date to the mid-1800s.
“They were people at one time,” he said, and deserve to be remembered.
Goodloe hopes to find a way to locate the graves and put markers on them. He might even be able to use his 3-D printer for markers, he said.
But that’s a project for another day. The tree debris was job 1.
“We’ve been out here a couple of hours, and we made pretty good progress on this,” he said.
One of the DAR volunteers told Bachman that the group’s members wanted to clean tombstones, she said. “I said, ‘honey, that’s kind of frivolous right now’.”
During the storm, Bachman stood in the doorway of the office.
“I heard the red oak on the west bank crack and come down first,” she said. Others soon followed. “That’s what it looked like, dominoes falling all in a row.”
Three of them fell on the building she was standing in.
Workers had to clear fallen trees from the road to be able to go home that night. “We’re lucky no one was hurt here,” she said.
“We’re blessed. We’re lucky to be on this side of the grass.”
Cleaning up the debris has taken a month so far and “there’s weeks’ worth of work left out here,” Sherry Taylor estimated.
Meanwhile, the leaves have been a haven for mosquitoes and other insects.
“We’ve seen more weird bugs than I’ve ever seen,” Bachman said.
Doug Ross is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.